What do you not get about the state, our own government, forcing individuals out of their individualism and into state collectivist system of purchasing, against their collective wills, to redistribute income to others who supposedly, through no fault of their own, cannot afford to purchase health care.
A "requirement" is not a suggestion, you know, its a mandatory rule backed up by the full force of the federal government.
Good trap, seeing as you only esnared (sic) yourself. Tar baby sticky, this attempt at hiding the left's inevitable relationship with this historically failed ideology.
I didn't intend for this to devolve into a discussion of the ACA, which has helped millions in the U.S., so far.
If Keynes was still alive, he'd title your post "A General Theory of Obamacare Fiction," but let me critique your
nutty views on redistribution first.
First, conservatives are hypocrites. They object to redistribution when it's going from the rich to the poor but it's just fine to redistribute government money to hedge funds when they
run into trouble.
Second, it’s kind of interesting to read your post right after reading
Piketty, because one point Piketty makes is that the modern notion that redistribution is un-American is completely at odds with our country’s actual history. One subsection in Piketty’s book is titled “Confiscatory Taxation of Excess Incomes: An American Invention”; he shows that America actually pioneered very high taxes on the rich:
When we look at the history of progressive taxation in the twentieth century, it is striking to see how far out in front Britain and the United States were, especially the latter, which invented the confiscatory tax on “excessive” incomes and fortunes.
Why was this the case? Piketty points to the American egalitarian ideal, which went along with fear of creating a hereditary aristocracy. High taxes, especially on estates, were motivated in part by “fear of coming to resemble Old Europe.”
Just to reemphasize the point: during the Progressive Era, it was commonplace and widely accepted to support high taxes on the rich specifically in order to keep the rich from getting richer -- a position that few people in politics today would dare espouse. As your post so vividly illustrates, many people nowadays imagine that redistribution and high taxes on the rich are antithetical to American ideals, indeed practically communism. They
and you have no idea (and wouldn’t believe) that redistribution is in reality as American as apple pie.
Third, on your rant about Obamacare, here’s what you need to understand. The Affordable Care Act isn’t magic -- it produces losers as well as winners. But it’s not black magic either, turning everyone into a loser. What the Act does is in effect to increase the burden on fortunate people -- the healthy and wealthy -- to lift some burdens on the less fortunate: people with chronic illnesses or other preexisting conditions, low-income workers.
Those struggling worker that had adequate coverage that right-wingers
say are now being confronted with unaffordable premiums, get subsidies. Those without coverage, if they live in a state not dominated by a reactionary ideology, they get Expanded Medicaid. That's certainly better than going without healthcare -- what they did previous to the ACA.
Fourth, while you righteously portray this as the middle class workers being the losers, the real losers under Obamacare are people in the one percent paying higher taxes, healthy young men who are getting by with cheap, minimalist policies. But right-wingers want sob stories -- the sick middle-aged woman facing tragedy. And so far, every single one of those sob stories has turned out to be false -- because the very nature of the reform is such that such those are the people that the Act helps.
Now that Trump and the GOP are doing their best to sabotage Obamacare, it's going to be interesting in state that Trump carried widely, that are going to be hurt by Trump's attack on Obamacare.
Halt In Subsidies For Health Insurers Expected To Drive Up Costs For Middle Class.
